The BusLogic is the most reliable driver I have seen under linux. It isn't
absolutely perfect though. I had one in a machine where I had three narrow
SCSI devices and one Wide SCSI drive. I didn't have a wide SCSI cable at the
time I installed the drive, so I used the narrow-to-wide adapter that came
with the drive and plugged this wide drive into the narrow SCSI cable. The
thing wouldn't work at all, and it was easy to tell it was missing every other
byte from the wide drive when you looked at the boot up messages. After
unplugging the drive, which I did as the machine was coming up but before the
SCSI BIOS had started, the BIOS didn't find the drive (as it shouldn't have),
but after the boot was complete, the system was somewhat unreliable. Then,
next time I rebooted the machine, using a full power down cycle, the card came
up fine and I never had another problem, tape backups and everything.
As for the Adaptec, there is a test version of a new Adaptec driver released
just a few days ago by Dan Eischen (he is the one responsible for converting
the FreeBSD driver to linux compatible, then Dean takes what Dan has and makes
the needed patches usually, including touching up things that Dan doesn't get
done absolutely cleanly). If I remember correctly, you can grab the patch
from ftp.pcnet.com:/pub/users/deischen/Linux or something like that.
As for all of the conversations about disks formatted with one controller or
another and switching, I've never had a problem switching SCSI controllers,
but then again I always disable extended translation entirely, then make a
root partition that falls into the first 1024 cylinders. It seems that all
SCSI cards can handle this setup (they should anyway :)
-- ***************************************************************************** * Doug Ledford * Unix, Novell, Dos, Windows 3.x, * * dledford@dialnet.net 873-DIAL * WfW, Windows 95 & NT Technician * * PPP access $14.95/month ***************************************** * Springfield, MO and surrounding * Usenet news, e-mail and shell account.* * communities. Sign-up online at * Web page creation and hosting, other * * 873-9000 V.34 * services available, call for info. * *****************************************************************************